SOL CRESTA

I played the demo twice and wanted the full experience. I enjoyed SOL CRESTA. I played the very easy mode, brought down my blood pressure, and enjoyed the game. The negative will be that almost all of the stages seemed very similar, and to me was very disappointing. Overall if you're looking for a shmup that has a classic feel with many different options including varying skill levels, Sol Cresta is decent enough to pick up when it's below 10 bucks. Sol Cresta didn't wow me, but it gave me what I was looking for and that was to just veg out playing a shmup piloting a ship. 7/10 Full controller support.

I never played any of the older Cresta games, but as a newcomer to the series, I found it to be a solid SHMUP with some flaws. It takes a solid hour or two to get used to the gameplay around your ship components, but once it clicks, there is a quite a bit of depth to it. The game also comes with multiple difficulties and overall felt fairly balanced to me. Some of the bosses look more intimidating than they actually are. I will say that I found the UI hard to read and easy to drown in the rest of the visuals. Especially in hectic situations I found myself more looking around the HUD instead of the action. I also found some of the backgrounds really hard to read - objects that I figured were part of the background turned out to be obstacles. In general I found it at times hard to differentiate between obstacles, enemies and items. There's just a lot going on and I think the devs could have done a better job differentiating these elements. It's obvious that the game was made with a lot of love for its genre and mechanics, but I wish the developer would have put more work into making sure the visual side support it equally.

Give it an hour or two for the mechanics to click. Won't be as fun on your first run, but once you understand the formations and shot switching, it's a good time. Worth it on sale for sure.

this isn't how I remember sonic heroes

Yeah, cool game and fun mechanics. Approachable and a pleasure to play. Cool soundtrack too

Sol Cresta is based on an underrated shooter classic with a great mix of modern elements and a new soundtrack on classic Nichibutsu hardware. It's also got a new lower price.